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Presentation will also be webcast at http://www.fin.ucar.edu/it/mms/cg-live.htm
Is the magnetic field in the internetwork horizontal or isotropic?
Recent investigations of the magnetic field vector properties in the solar internetwork have provided diverging results. While some works found that the internetwork is mostly pervaded by horizontal magnetic fields, other works argued in favor of an isotropic distribution. Motivated by these seemingly contradictory results and by the fact that most of these works have employed spectropolarimetric data at disk center only, we have revisited this problem employing high-quality data (noise level $\sigma \approx 3\times 10^{-4}$ in units of the quiet-Sun intensity) at different latitudes recorded with the Hinode/SP instrument. Instead of applying traditional inversion codes of the radiative transfer equation to retrieve the magnetic field vector at each spatial point on the solar surface and studying the resulting distribution of the magnetic field vector, we surmised a theoretical distribution function of the magnetic field vector and used it to obtain the theoretical histograms of the Stokes profiles. These histograms were then compared to the observed ones. Any mismatch between them was ascribed to the theoretical distribution of the magnetic field vector, which was subsequently modified to produce a better fit to the observed histograms. With this method we find that Stokes profiles with signals above $2\times 10^{-3}$ (in units of the continuum intensity) cannot be explained by an isotropic distribution of the magnetic field vector. We also find that the differences between the histograms of the Stokes profiles observed at different latitudes cannot be explained in terms of line-of-sight effects. However, they can be explained by a distribution of the magnetic field vector that inherently varies with latitude.